The Football Four

By Doug Franz | January 13, 2015 at 6:12 pmUPDATED: April 28, 2015 at 2:00 pm

Don’t touch it. It worked.

The College Football Playoff was a smashing success financially, ratings-wise and for the fans. Anyone arguing to preserve the BCS for the last 15 years has been proven to be a fool or a liar. Ignore the national push for eight teams. Let this breathe for a few years.

This season was exacting proof what a waste the BCS was and how wrong it was for over 100 football teams to be reduced to two. Ohio State did not have the non-conference schedule, record or conference affiliation (due to non-conference September embarrassment) to earn a top-2 seed. Meaning, if the BCS was still in effect, the 2015 National Champion would not have been the best team in college football.

However, look back through the last 20 years of college football, it is rare that team five in the rankings really had a rightful claim to the title “snub.” TCU and Baylor weren’t invited to the party and the party lacked nothing. It will be years before the next TCU claims how egregious the process is. Keeping the playoff at four teams upholds the weekly pressure of the regular season but still allows a Buckeye-type story of overcoming adversity and injury to win a National Championship.

Do you feel like the playoff was missing anything because Michigan State wasn’t in it? The Spartans were No. 8 in the last regular season CFP poll. The playoff went great without them.

It’s been 40 years since college athletics said “No” to a financial windfall. This is that moment. Less is clearly more in college football. The NCAA already has the Final Four and the Frozen Four. The next step is to preserve the “Football Four.”